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Social Justice

Bhopal Gas Peedit Nirashrit Pensionbhogi Sangharsh Morcha activist Balkrishman Namdeo said that at a time when the government was spending huge amounts on recreational events, many widows of gas victims were waiting to get their pensions.

Their testimonies segue into how propaganda about “beef eaters” in India makes incensed mobs out of ordinary men. Through articulate first-person accounts of victims who hold India’s Hindu Right responsible for communally-charged mob violence, Lynch Nation also spotlights the struggle of ordinary citizens against far-right vigilantism’s unchecked power.

The moot question is whether it is possible to reconcile individual liberties and state’s interests. The bigger question would be what would be the responsibility of the courts if individual liberties and state’s interests are at loggerheads and state uses illegal means to curtail individual liberties.

The RSS-affiliated teachers who are members of bodies like the Academic Council and Executive Council are attacking Kancha Ilaiah, Christophe Jaffrelot or any thinker/scholar who has expressed criticism of the RSS or Hindutva ideology. They are thus fabricating false pretexts and flimsy excuses to have all critical and divergent opinion removed from DU syllabi and curriculum.

Stressing the provision available to the arrestees under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc), Justice Mridula Bhatkar says that the provision as contemplated by Section 167 of the Code is a “laudable provision” vindicating the right of the accused to be released after the stipulated period and an incomplete investigation beyond 90 days cannot be a ground to deny the accused bail.

IAPL condemns the threat issued by Shivaji Pawar, ACP, Maharashtra Police to arrest IAPL’s President Justice Hosbet Suresh (Retd.) and the most alarming portrayal by him of IAPL as a frontal organisation of CPI (Maoist). IAPL believes that such attacks on Judges and Human Right defenders which includes lawyers and organisations, require to be understood in the in the light of rising authoritarianism and fascist attacks in the country.

It is the obligation of lawyers to uphold public interest. My social commitment to the #MeToo movement overrides my professional engagement, and therefore I have taken a conscious decision to stop representing Talib Hussain in any court.

It is evident that neither Vishaka guidelines nor The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (‘SHW Act’) were followed by the organisations, as most of the complaints were either not investigated properly, or women could not complain.

We are in a situation where the allegations of sexual harassment are so pervasive — ranging from the judiciary, the legal profession, the newsrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and politicians — that it would be counterproductive to deal with each case individually. What is required is a commission of inquiry to inquire into the failures of the existing legal systems and the Sexual Harassment Act to prevent the happening of these incidents.

The stark difference between the majority judgment authored by Justice AM Khanwilkar and signed on by the then CJI Dipak Misra and the one written by Justice D Y Chandrachud outline how starkly divergent Supreme Court’s understanding of a complex political and legal issue that is the Bhima Koregaon arrests and the subsequent case hearing can be. While Justice Chandrachud’s judgment is a fine example of constitutional morality, the same simply be not said of the other.

Mob lynching in India in many cases has received the sanction of the State, just like how the U.S. Senate kept silent while thousands of African Americans were lynched over many decades. To recognise the deep-seated abhorrence in the society, and calling it what it is, that is “lynching”, sends a very powerful message that criminal acts of hatred are not tolerated in an equitable society.

Given that the marker of identity of Scheduled Castes is the historic disadvantage of the untouchable, the question of proving backwardness by quantifiable data does not arise. This was the basic flaw of the Nagaraj judgment; its failure to recognise these markers of identity. This now stands corrected.